US 'botmaster' jailed for nearly 5 years for computer hacking (AFP)

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - A US computer hacker was jailed for nearly five years for hijacking around 400,000 computers, including military servers, and infecting them with malicious software.

Sealing the first prosecution of its kind, US federal Judge Gary Klausner in Los Angeles sentenced "botmaster" Jeanson Ancheta, 20, to 57 months in jail for taking control of an array of computers he had corralled into his "Botnet."

Ancheta had pleaded guilty in January to infecting the computers with software that caused them to send spam, show ads and launch crippling attacks on Internet sites.

The crime was "extensive, serious and sophisticated," the judge told the court as he handed down the longest-known sentence for someone accused of spreading computer viruses.

"Your worst enemy is your own intellectual arrogance that somehow the world cannot touch you on this," the judge told Ancheta.

Ancheta admitted to conspiring to violate both the Computer Fraud Abuse Act and an anti-spam law, to causing damage to US defense computers and to hacking into computers to commit fraud.

The youth stood accused of infecting "armies" of computers and turning them into "bots" that are then used to launch destructive attacks on servers or send huge quantities of spam, or unwanted e-mails.

Ancheta then charged spammers for spreading their dubious wares over his hijacked network after agreeing with them how many bots would be needed to accomplish the task, prosecutors say.

He was accused of infecting computers at the Weapons Division of the sensitive US Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake in California and some used by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

He admitted he was paid a total of 3,000 dollars by clients for access to networks of the computers he had infected by downloading damaging software.

In more than 30 separate transactions, he sold networks of up to 10,000 infected "bots" each, his plea agreement stated.

According to the court papers, advertising service companies would pay Ancheta for each computer he was able to infect with software that displays unsolicited ads to the user.

To continually grow his network of infected computers, Ancheta would have his "zombie" computers scan the Internet for vulnerable machines, documents stated.

Ancheta admitted generating more than 107,000 dollars in advertising affiliate proceeds for downloading the adware onto more than 400,000 vulnerable computers that he had infected.

In pleading guilty, Ancheta agreed to pay about 15,000 dollars in restitution to the Weapons Division of the US Naval Air Warfare Center and to the Defense Information Systems Agency.

In addition to paying restitution to the US government, Ancheta also agreed to forfeit his proceeds from the illegal hacking, including more than 60,000 dollars in cash, a 1993 BMW luxury car and computer equipment.

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